hash for which no local expansion is available, Nix can execute a
`substitute' which should produce a path with such a hash.
This is policy-free since Nix does not in any way specify how the
substitute should work, i.e., it's an arbitrary (unnormalised)
fstate expression. For example, `nix-pull' registers substitutes
that fetch Nix archives from the network (through `wget') and unpack
them, but any other method is possible as well. This is an
improvement over the old Nix sharing scheme, which had a policy
(fetching through `wget') built in.
The sharing scheme doesn't work completely yet because successors
from fstate rewriting have to be registered on the receiving side.
Probably the whole successor stuff can be folded up into the
substitute mechanism; this would be a nice simplification.
archives (using the package in corepkgs/nar).
* queryPathByHash -> expandHash, and it takes an argument specifying
the target path (which may be empty).
* Install the core Fix packages in $prefix/share/fix. TODO: bootstrap
Nix and install Nix as a Fix package.
a mapping from the hash to a url has been registered through `nix
regurl'.
* Bug fix in nix: don't pollute stdout when running tar, it made
nix-switch barf.
* Bug fix in nix-push-prebuilts: don't create a subdirectory on the
target when rsync'ing.
sharing package directories (i.e., the result of building a Nix
descriptor).
`nix-pull-prebuilts' obtains a list of all known prebuilts by
consulting the paths and URLs specified in
$prefix/etc/nix/prebuilts.conf. The mappings ($pkghash,
$prebuilthash) and ($prebuilthash, $location) are registered with
Nix so that it can use the prebuilt with hash $prebuilthash when
installing a package with hash $pkghash by downloading and unpacking
$location.
`nix-push-prebuilts' creates prebuilts for all packages for which no
prebuilt is known to exist. It can then optionally upload these
to the network through rsync.
`nix-[pull|push]-prebuilts' just provide a policy. Nix provides the
mechanism through the `nix [export|regprebuilt|regurl]' commands.
* Command `nix ensure' which is like `nix getpkg' except that if the
has refers to a run action it will just ensure that the imports are
there.
* Command `nix closure' to print out the closure of the set of
descriptors under the import relation, starting at a set of roots.
This can be used for garbage collection (e.g., given a list of
`activated' packages, we can delete all packages not reachable from
those).
* Command `nix graph' to print out a Dot graph of the dependency
graph.
* `nix-addroot' adds a root for the (unimplemented) garbage collector.
action. Run actions are described by uniquely hashed descriptors,
just like build actions. Therefore run actions can have
dependencies, but these need not be the same as the build time
dependencies (e.g., at runtime we can link against a different
version of a dynamic library). Example:
nix run 31d6bf4c171282367065e0deecd7c579
will run the Pan 0.13.91 newsreader with gtkspell support.
files) are now referenced using their cryptographic hashes.
This ensures that if two package descriptors have the same contents,
then they describe the same package. This property is not as
trivial as it sounds: generally import relations cause this property
not to hold w.r.t. temporality. But since imports also use hashes
to reference other packages, equality follows by induction.
